Wyoming DOC Cuts Inmate Programs
The Wyoming Department of Corrections is cutting inmate sex offender and mental health treatment programs to save money. Reported by the AP.
Steve Lindly, deputy director of the Wyoming Department of Corrections, said Monday that the department has decided it won’t renew a sex offender treatment contract worth roughly $850,000 with Forensic Health Services, a Massachusetts company. The contract expires at the end of this month. Lindly said the company has provided treatment of sex offenders at various Wyoming prisons over the past year. He said the company was treating about 220 inmates at any given time and had provided services to more than 500 over the course of the contract.
Forensic Health Services used psychologists as well as trained social workers to provide therapeutic treatment of sex offenders, Lindly said. He said that prison staff will take over the treatment efforts, as they did in the years before the company started. Because the corrections department workers generally don’t have the same level of training as the company workers, Lindly said they will focus on offering inmates a program that’s more educational in scope, rather than therapeutic.
The department is also dropping its Pride Program, which provided three mental health staffers to work with mentally ill inmates at the state penitentiary in Rawlins, he said. Lindly said Prison Health Services, a private company that provides medical care at the prison, had operated the Pride Program. Lindly said the program was dropped as part of negotiations between the department and the company over how to whittle down the company’s proposed $750,000 increase in its annual contract.
There is much more detail in the complete article.
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